I'm setting no limits, but I focus on matters suggested by these words: Spiritual, mystical, philosophical, metaphysical, psychological, soul, psychic, ESP, awakening, enlightenment, the Source. I do not advocate any organized religion. My thoughts on political and international affairs are in another blog.
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Thursday, January 4, 2007

The Unobstructed Universe

I am wary of “channeled” writings for obvious reasons, and yet I’ve found some extremely interesting ideas in books which claim to contain messages from some person or entity other than the one reporting the messages.

THE UNOBSTRUCTED UNIVERSE purports to contain communications from the deceased wife of the author, Stewart Edward White, channeled through a friend, a medium named Jane, during the 1930’s. (At least one other witness was regularly involved.) Stewart’s wife, Betty, had for years worked with him on exploring “the other side” psychically, and now she began to report about her existence since dying.

Unless the author was flat-out fabricating the whole story, which I doubt, the evidence of authenticity which he gives is persuasive. Certainly (in the absence of flagrant lying) the participants in the long project believed they were really in contact with Betty.

No matter how often I tell myself that it is impossible to comprehend Existence, much less explain it, I remain curious, and when someone says, “I’ve been there and seen the afterlife for myself,” I can’t turn away without at least glancing at the account . . . sometimes just long enough to realize how irritatingly silly it is.

According to Betty, there is no “heaven” out there beyond our universe. There is one universe, and everything is within the universe we humans know and perceive. The catch is that our abilities to perceive are only a small bit of the possible ways of perceiving. In a darkened room, a human, a cat, an X-ray machine, and a radio are going to perceive different things, and yet the contents of the room are the same. When the lights are turned on, the human perceives the room quite differently from before, and yet nothing about the room has changed except perception. A soul without a solid physical body could be standing right next to you now, and without the ability to perceive that particular kind of thing, you would never know she is there.

Other than varieties of perception, Betty’s main point about the nature of the universe is its range of “frequencies”, which means the same as that overused word, “vibrations”. Everything has its own frequency – and Betty’s universe sounds surprisingly like the “string theory” universe at times. People in Betty’s state function at higher frequencies than people still hauling around the bodies we are familiar with.

It is a commonplace of “spiritual” discussions that those in physical bodies in the familiar material aspect of the universe are in a denser environment and function at lower rates of vibration than the existence experienced by “spirits”. One of the main reasons we cannot usually see or communicate with spirits is the difference in frequencies. Betty gives the example of the blades of an electric fan, which totally obscure our view of things beyond when they are stationary or moving slowly but allow us to see through them as if nothing were there when they are spinning at top speed.

The lower frequency universe which we in denser bodies navigate is the “obstructed universe”, while Betty resides in an “unobstructed universe”. She says it is all one universe, with the same natural laws, but it is perceived and experienced differently. In the simplest terms, in the obstructed universe we are constantly running up against hard objects which have to be dealt with, and our experience of time and space is much more cumbersome than Betty’s. In the unobstructed universe she can move from place to place with the swiftness of imagination. She can move through objects which we call solid.

Her perceptions of space and time are different, but in ways I wouldn’t care to try to describe here. My main problem with White’s book is that it asks of the reader a dedication to learning a special vocabulary and a set of sometimes obscure concepts which challenges my degree of interest. The question frequently came to me, “Is this really worth the trouble?” Well, the same question came to me during a number of college courses, but that’s another matter.

What I most wanted was a nice tidy description of life “on the other side”, and I got something much more complicated. Jane alleged an actual view of Betty and her associates, and said that they were like us except glowing and beautifully colored. Her main impression was that Betty’s world was much more fluid than ours. Betty said that although she can pass through objects which would impede us, she can also “manage” things so that she can, for example, rest on a river bank and admire the flowers rather than sink through it. She drew a parallel with a man in a swimming pool who can at will either float, swim, or sink.

I’ve tried to describe just the basic concepts of our relatively awkward “obstructed” universe and the more flowing and easily negotiated “unobstructed” universe. From these concepts I get some help with the vexed question of defining “spiritual” and “spirit”.

For a start, what I gropingly call “spiritual” would not be “another world”, not a “spirit world” somewhere separate from ours or composed of an entirely different “immaterial” substance from ours, but our world at its higher levels of frequencies, perceived through means which we in these cumbersome bodies do not have. This description comports with my youthful illumination (and the similar realizations of millions of other people, I’m sure) that the universe we humans see and touch is created of and maintained by “something deeper”, which I could only call “spirit”.

About Me

I've lived many lives in one lifetime while teaching literature and creative writing in several universities, earning my living as a fiction writer for 10 years (4 of them in England), and practicing law (appellate practice mainly). Under my birth name, Fleming Lee Blitch, my children's books -- "The Amazing Adventures of Peter Grunt" and "The Last Dragon" -- were published by J.B. Lippincott Co.; I was a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellow as part of an award for Best Children's Fiction of the year. Various other books of mine were published, and I collaborated with Leslie Charteris on a number of books and television scripts in the "Saint" series. I've now retired from law and am devoting myself to playing and writing.